Audio 4:57
Holocaust survivor caught up in Missouri race riots

Brendan TrembathUpdated
Wed Aug 20 13:06:00 EST 2014

The race riots in the US state of Missouri have produced a series of powerful images. Photographs of a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor in handcuffs have spread widely through social media sites. Hedy Epstein was arrested during a demonstration outside a building where the state governor has an office.

Transcript

TANYA NOLAN: A 90-year-old survivor of the Nazi Holocaust has become caught up the race riots in the US state of Missouri.

Hedy Epstein was arrested during a demonstration outside a building where the state governor has an office.

The protests, which began more than a week ago over the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer, have become more volatile.

And overnight tensions were stoked when two police officers shot dead a man armed with a knife at a Ferguson convenience store.

Hedy Epstein says she was protesting about the general use of force by police, who she accuses of deliberately inciting violence.

Brendan Trembath prepared this report.

HEDY EPSTEIN: I know what it means to be discriminated against and know what it means to be persecuted. I know what it means to be oppressed.

And the lesson from that is not that you turn around and oppress somebody else.

Police have used tear gas and rubber bullets in their efforts to restore order after days of rioting and looting triggered by the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

HEDY EPSTEIN: They want the violence to stop but you don't stop violence by being violent. Violence begets violence.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: Hedy Epstein escaped the horrors of the Holocaust.

In May 1939 she was one of 10,000 mostly Jewish children who were rescued from Germany and Austria and sent to live in Britain.

In many cases they were the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust.

After the war Hedy Epstein worked as a researcher in Germany, gathering evidence for the trial of Nazi doctors who performed medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.

She's since become a well known political activist and on Monday she was part of a protest outside a building where the Missouri governor has an office.

HEDY EPSTEIN: Somebody approached me and asked me would you be willing to be arrested and without even blinking an eye I said, yeah, that's OK.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: Why did you feel so passionately about this?

HEDY EPSTEIN: I mean, Ferguson is like a suburb of St Louis. It's not really a town far removed from here. It's part of St Louis really. It's part of greater St Louis.

And the violence that has gone on there has just, I mean, it's been just horrendous. This afternoon I understand a second African-American was shot and killed.

The police in Ferguson from the very beginning, and increasingly so, tried to incite the people that are there, the people that are protesting, the people that live there in that community, to become more violent so that the police has a good reason to become even more violent than they are.

In my mind I thought the police were a peace force and then they become a war force.

I mean, they're equipped not only with their usual equipment but the Federal Government has either sold or given military equipment that was used in Iraq and in Afghanistan to the community of Ferguson, to the city of St Louis and to many other cities across the United States.

And though they have this military equipment there, the police hasn't been trained in using it, and it's like little boys with a toy and let's practice this toy on the people who are here.

And it's a very lethal toy that they have there, this equipment, this military equipment, and the police shouldn't be militarily equipped for it.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: With your own arrest, were you fairly treated by the police? How were you treated?

HEDY EPSTEIN: They did what they had to do. You know, they had to put handcuffs on us, and they did. And they had to put us in the paddy-wagon to take us to this police station which would have been too far to walk to.

And the police there booked us, because that's what they do, that's their job, but they were not violent, they were not nasty to us.

BRENDAN TREMBATH: How concerned are you about the image of the violence, the protests, the looting, that it's going around the world, this picture of a situation in Ferguson, Missouri?

HEDY EPSTEIN: Right, I understand that there are people there who don't live in Ferguson, who don't live here in St Louis, they're coming from other cities and they're coming there to create problems.

They're coming there to loot and to throw bottles of whatever at the police, and that disturbs me greatly. That's totally, totally wrong. That should not happen.

TANYA NOLAN: That was 90-year-old Hedy Epstein who was arrested in Missouri. She was speaking there to Brendan Trembath.